The Majestic Metro Is Never An Ordinary Underground Ride

Moscow By Subway

MOSCOW — As this 1,000-year-old city plunges ever deeper into capitalism, its renowned subway remains a refreshing and rumbling step back into more authoritarian times.

Colorful mosaics featuring Vladimir Lenin and other heroes of the 1917 revolution peer out from thewalls and ceilings. Wooden railings line graceful elevators. Chandeliers, life-size sculptures, torch sconces, marble and granite floors -- it all seems more museum than subway, and a long way from the grimy streets above ground.

Everywhere, people are pushing and shoving, carrying everything from sacks of potatoes to laptop computers to cases of ever-marketable cigarettes bearing Western names like ``Hollywood.'' Stern-looking soldiers in long overcoats stand watch. At rush hour, trains arrive nearly every minute.

For three weeks last spring, I groped my way around Moscow using the city's majestic Metro, an underground system unlike anything most American commuters have ever seen. To the visitor armed with a guidebook, a vague understanding of the Cyrillic alphabet and a willingness to dive into crowds of people, the subway offers one of the best and cheapest sightseeing bargains in Moscow.

This is no ordinary underground tube -- it is an astounding and elegant achievement that first opened in 1935 and that today serves more than 7 million passengers daily at nearly 150 stations on hundreds of kilometers of track.

After days of marveling at the platforms, which felt more like a museum atrium than a grim subterranean passage, I set aside a day to explore some of the older and more impressive stations in the center city area. Just as interesting as the underground sights were the makeshift flea markets and would-be profiteers clogging the streets and sidewalks above, where a visitor could buy a puppy as easily as a Snickers bar. (But watch your wallet -- pickpockets are skillful here, and fanny packs and bulging jacket pockets can be quickly sliced open and emptied.)

My guide for this underground adventure was 18-year-old Ruslan Ismailov, a part-time college student I had met through friends. A teenage slacker nicknamed ``Grunge,'' Ismailov came complete with a baggy flannel shirt, L.A. Raiders baseball hat, Sonic Youth playing on his Sony Walkman -- and a knowledge of the rails gained from many nightly ramblings around the city.

Since the fall of Communism, many, including Ismailov, say the stations aren't so tidy anymore, with fewer government workers to clean the cavernous halls. Still, these Russian railway stations are easily as clean as those in Washington, Montreal and San Francisco, some of the best-maintained subways I have visited.

Seeing Socialist utopia

We begin our day at the Aeroport station, where, for a 1,000 ruble note, I get a pocketful of 10 small plastic tokens. Each journey on the massive Moscow Metro costs just a few dimes in Western currency. I bring along a color-coded map of the different subway lines, so I can read the confusing signs at each station. (Early in my visit, I had memorized what Aeroport and a few other station names look like in Cyrillic, so I could find my way home.)

Squeezing into an insanely overcrowded car, we depart for one of the busier stations, Belorusskaya.

The Belorusskaya station feels like the dimly lit set of a '30s movie. People push and shove past the newsboys (selling one of more than a half-dozen daily papers) to funnel into a long downward escalator lined with globe-topped, torch-style lights.

Passengers are grim-faced and aggressive. Stopping or hestitating at the bottom of the escalators is risky; someone will likely deliver a stout shove, much as an old babushka did to me on one of my first Metro trips.

Riding on the circuit, a ring line that connects the various lines that snake out from the center city, we soon arrive at the Novoslobodskaya station, one of the most beautiful, completed in 1952. Backlighted stained-glass panels line the hallway. Individual round panels feature artists, factory workers, golden wheatfields and farmers at work -- the Socialist utopia. The black-and- white checkered floor is made of granite. A huge golden-hued mosaic dedicated to ``the mothers of the world'' dominates one wall.

As in other stations, groups of small gypsy children come up to beg. They aren't cute: We have heard many stories of groups of these kids surrounding and robbing unsuspecting Westerners.

``Here, there should be more cops,'' Ismailov says, recalling a recent late night stick-up in a station nearby when thugs took his prized leather jacket.

Continuing to ride the circuit in clockwise fashion, we soon arrive at the Komsomolskaya station, named for the once-popular Communist youth organization. The subway cars look like old model train toys: green and blue molded metal, with wooden interiors and porthole-like windows. At Komsomolskaya, hunched-over old women sell tokens from booths, pushing them across a well-worn marble stone.